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Juggling all the aspects of my life with some baking, writing and good old fashioned ranting thrown in

Saturday, 18 February 2012

"What is it?"

The Little Monster has always been a curious child. If anything new enters the room, she must look at it, touch it, smell it and probably shove it in her mouth just in case it tastes interesting too. Of course, this habit extends to anything that actually belongs to me, The Other Half or any adult visitors we may have.

Since she started to talk, this curiosity has taken the form of questions. I'm fairly sure her first full sentence was "Where is it?", quickly followed by "Where's it gone?" We, of course, were thrilled when this occurred. More recently, her speech has become much more fluent. I think she knows how to say pretty much anything one might need in everyday life. She's very polite and rarely forgets her manners. All of this makes me fairly proud of her. I could start on a rant about how children these days never bother to say please and thank you but I shan't. Besides, I think I summed it up pretty well with that one sentence. My Little Monster has now learnt the phrase "What is it?". Well, actually, she learnt it quite a while ago but she's suddenly developed a liking for it. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's her favourite phrase.

Yesterday, I took her to our local museum. She enjoyed it very much and, since almost everything there was new to her, I think she must have used her new favourite phrase at least a hundred times. Now, of course I'm very pleased that she's eager to learn new things and it was lovely to watch her marvel at massive animals in the natural history section and beautiful paintings in the art section. But after a while, repeating basically the same description for many items (how many different ways can you really say "clay vase"?), it starts to get a little frustrating. I had to tell myself over and over again that I must answer her. She wasn't doing anything wrong. I must resist the urge to lead her away from another row of very similar looking porcelain figurines or another display cabinet filled with silver bowls that have very little difference between them. They were all impressive and she thought them all very pretty. Surprisingly, she also didn't tire of being told ten times or more that she was looking at another punch bowl.

The strange thing is, this doesn't seem to end at home anymore. She'll point at objects that I'm sure she knows the name of and asks "What is it?" I continue to answer every time she asks, though I also often add "But you already knew that, didn't you?" and, with a big cheeky grin on her face, she replies "Of course Mummy!"